Coaching For Success
IBC
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Posts by IBC
Take Advantage Of Great New Software To Maximise Your SEO Efforts
Dec 15th
If there’s one thing that internet business owners agree on, it’s the need to constantly monitor and improve their search engine rankings.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an ongoing process that takes constant care and attention but can provide amazing rewards over the long term.
Software To Improve Your SEO
One of the tools at the disposal of online business owners and internet marketers is a vast array of SEO software. But, this is not software that can be installed once and then be left to be a “cure-all” for your SEO efforts, i.e. it’s not a “set-it-and-forget-it” proposition. It helps with understanding of the environment and taking advantage of its opportunities.
There are an enormous number of software solutions available, ranging from link-building to on-page optimisation, with a major shift in emphasis, moving from stand-alone solutions to complete platforms to improve SEO efforts.
Top SEO Software
Here are a few of what we think are the top SEO software currently on the market:
1. Conductor
Conductor Searchlight is software acting as a service that is subscription-based and measures the ROI on SEO efforts as well as gathering data and prioritising and improving decision making.
2. LotusJump
A unique piece of software that analyses competitor SEO efforts and industry trends and produces a prioritised task list based on the benefits those tasks may bring. The platform has been enhanced by the recent addition of social profile and Q&A tasks.
3. SEOmoz
SEOmoz provides a suite of competitive analysis and link building tools such as Open Site Explorer, which compares competitors’ backlinks, identifies top pages and analyses anchor text. They also supply ranking and keyword research tools such as Rank Tracker, along with many other excellent SEO tools.
4. BrightEdge
BrightEdge aims to help get the most out of organic searches by providing data to help identify opportunities to drive more traffic and increase sales, prioritise projects according to their anticipated ROI and permit the execution of related strategies.
5. Ontolo
Ontolo focuses on one of the primary facets of search engine optimisation (SEO), that being link-building. The software creates a database of link prospects by trawling through ten to fifteen thousand URLs per month, which can then be searched and analysed for relevance and value through such criteria as PageRank.
If you want to further your internet business‘s search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts, you’d be well advised to take advantage of the abundance of SEO software available and of the above tools and services in particular.
Check with an internet marketing service for help with all your search engine optimisation (SEO) needs and for advice on which software solution might be appropriate for your business.
Plug-Ins To Help Split Test Your WordPress Blog
Dec 13th
As part of your internet business‘s search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy, it’s highly recommended you have a blog to help drive traffic to your main site. There are many options available as to the platform you choose, on which to build your blog, but one of the most popular, most powerful and most versatile is WordPress.
So, let’s say you’ve created your blog using WordPress, and you’re not getting the results you want in terms of conversions. You decide you need to make changes to your site to try to improve your conversion rates, but, as with changes you’ve made before, it’s a bit of a hit-or-miss affair since you’ve no way of testing which of the options you’re considering might work best.
What do you do?
Test To Discover What Works Best
Instead of making changes to your blog and publishing them only to discover they don’t work, or, at least, don’t give you the results you’re looking for, a better alternative is to perform split testing to find out which of your choices would work best.
It’s surprising how little consideration is given to the idea of split testing where WordPress is concerned. If you don’t perform any testing, how can you know the answers to questions like, “Are the headlines in my posts receiving clicks?”, or, “What’s the best location on a screen for my calls to action?”?
Help Is At Hand
Fortunately, taking care of the task of split testing has been made a lot easier thanks to the availability of several WordPress plug-ins.
1. Headline Split Tester
An interesting, enticing headline can make the difference between whether a visitor reads the rest of your post or clicks through to another web site. This new plug-in lets bloggers test alternative headlines for every post. Each headline is displayed and alternated with the other in random sequence up to a maximum number of “headline views” and the number of clicks each headline gets is tracked. The headline that receives the most clicks is then declared “the winner” and used as that post’s headline from that point on.
2. SES Theme Split Test
Almost as important to the success of a blog as the headline is the theme, or template, selected to represent that blog. With this plug-in two templates can be alternated along with the various elements within the template that may help affect conversions. The results of user on-page activity are tracked through the use of custom segments available within Google Analytics.
3. Visual Website Optimzer
This is a commercial plug-in which allows blog owners to connect to their VWO account to create and test several versions of their blog, each with different activities users can do, to see how each fares as far as web site traffic is concerned. There is a fee associated with this plug-in, but a 30 day trial version is available that allows testing of up to 1,000 visitors, but which can only be run once.
Armed with these plug-ins, you’ll be able to test most of the features of your internet business‘s WordPress blog and take the guesswork out of what works best.
You can take advantage of a UK internet marketing service for help installing and using these plug-ins and for any WordPress-related help you may need.
New Twitter Features Can Help Extend Your Brand’s Global Reach
Dec 10th
Are you and your internet business taking advantage of the incredible opportunity to promote your web site that Twitter represents? It’s now a widely accepted fact that, in order to extend the reach of your brand and to maximise your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts, establishing a presence for your online business on the various social media platforms, including Twitter, is nothing short of essential.
Major Improvements From Twitter
The social media networks are constantly striving to improve the overall user experience and entice businesses to extend their reach and influence via a presence on their platforms. With this in mind, Twitter recently introduced a couple of major improvements to its platform, namely the addition of several countries and cities to both its Trending Topics and Translations features.
Since Twitter is a global communications platform, extending their services beyond just the scope of English-speaking countries and users is a logical extension and one that may be the first of many as Twitter seeks to gradually become more of the global entity it strives to be.
Extending Trending Topics
Trending Topics is a feature located in the bottom right-hand corner of the Twitter interface that shows the words and phrases that are the most tweeted in various cities and countries throughout the world. Now, in addition to the countries already featured, including Brazil, Canada, UK, USA, etc., thirteen new countries and six new cities have been added.
The countries added include Australia, Germany, India, Netherlands, and Venezuela. Amongst the new cities added are Detroit, Minneapolis, Sydney and Toronto. These represent some of the fastest-growing markets for Twitter, so the demand for the addition of these locations was extremely high, which means this will make a lot of users and business owners very happy.
This may not seem like a revolutionary change since trends were already being tracked in several countries and cities, but the addition of tracking trends showing repeated words and phrases from nineteen different global locations is a pretty significant increase in available data.
Tweets In Different Languages Now Translated
The other new feature is the translation of tweets now made possible through the use of Google’s Translation plug-in, which means more tweets will be available to more users. The translations will appear in the details pane of the Twitter interface, meaning that, if you’re a business owner, your tweets will be seen and understood by a whole new global audience. Now that’s quite an impressive extension of your brand’s reach and should be exciting news for your business’s global prospects going forward.
The increase in trends now available through the additional locations means there will be much more data available for you to use to identify trends your internet business can take advantage of. The translation service will make those new trends you identify available to a far wider global audience, extending your company’s influence to a whole new audience.
A UK internet business coach can help you and your business take advantage of Twitter’s new features and turn your company from a local to a global enterprise.
Increase Your Brand’s Exposure With Yelp Check-In Offers
Dec 3rd
We recently discussed getting your internet business set up in Facebook Places as a great way to increase your brand’s exposure. It allows users to “check in” to your business so their friends and fans can see where they are, making it possible for them to then become fans of your brand.
The use of location awareness is spreading like wildfire these days, and local review site Yelp has decided to expand their location awareness presence for business owners with a feature called “Check-in Offers”.
Reward Visitors When They Check In
Yelp has taken the location awareness feature one step further by not only giving business owners the option of having visitors check in, but also, when they do so, being able to reward them with coupons. The check-in feature has been available on Yelp for over a year, but giving businesses the ability to offer coupons as a reward to their patrons is a new option. To encourage and facilitate the use of this new feature, Yelp has made metrics available to its business owners to allow them to track the number of visitors that check into their business each week.
And here’s the great thing about spreading the word and creating an even bigger buzz about your business, and that is that, since Yelp is synchronised with Facebook and Twitter through its iPhone and Android apps, your visitors’ check-ins will be seen be their friends and followers. And, if your check-in offer is tempting enough, they may be beating a path to your business before their smartphone screen has finished loading the news about their friend’s check-in.
How Check-in Offers Works
After you set up your offer in Yelp, using your business owner dashboard, your customers will be presented with your offer on their smartphone upon check-in. They’ll then have the option to “Use It Now” so they can take advantage of the offer right there and then, and that offer will then be removed from their phone a little later. Or, they can save the offer for later use, using the “Save It!” option, and the offer will then be saved to several places on their phone, the business page where the offer was presented, the check-ins tab within the app and the “About Me” page.
This feature is currently only available to businesses within the U.S., U.K., Ireland and Canada, but will no doubt be rolled out to a wider audience if, as Yelp hopes, it proves successful. Also, certain “on the go” types of businesses, such as electricians, drivers, etc., are excluded from using this feature, since it is location based.
Put the power of Yelp and Check-in Offers to work for your internet business and see how much further your brand’s reach can extend.
A UK internet consultant can help get your business set up on all local awareness platforms, including Yelp Check-in Offers.
Mobile Devices Will Take Centre Stage This Shopping Season
Dec 2nd
We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again, since its importance bears repeating many times over, but if your internet business doesn’t have a mobile version of your web site, you could be missing the boat even while it’s still sitting at the dock on the eve of the end-of-year shopping frenzy.
Impressive Numbers
An IDC survey of smartphone users found that about half of those polled planned on using their phones to do price comparisons when doing their shopping while 32 percent said they would use their devices to check online reviews to help with their buying decisions.
Another survey by Yahoo! showed that the purchases of two-thirds of mobile users will be influenced by their mobile devices. And yet another survey by Luth Research showed that if retailers have a mobile version of their site they’ll attract the business of around 51 percent of consumers.
Internet v Mobile Internet
When consumers are in the heat of doing their Christmas shopping and are using their mobile devices to check for products or prices online, they only have so much time they’re willing to devote to these tasks. If your main web site has a lot of images and animation and is generally very busy, it may take an inordinate amount of time to load on a mobile device, by which time your visitors may well be long gone and winding up their purchases at a competitor’s site.
All the more reason to devote time and energy and, if necessary, expense to designing and creating a more streamlined version of your web site, stripping out any unnecessary features and providing users with the basic information they need for use on mobile devices.
Massive Mobile Contribution Expected
According to IDC, in the U.S. alone, it’s expected that retailers will make about $450 billion dollars, and mobile devices are expected to play a part in about $127 billion of that. The number of consumers actually making purchases with a smartphone is expected to be low, but a massive number of users will be indulging in many other online activities, which result in purchases.
This should send a clear message to retailers, and that message is that mobile e-commerce has arrived.
If your internet business is already set up for mobile e-commerce, you’ll have a distinct advantage over other online retailers. If not, contact a UK internet business coach, who will set your business up to take full advantage of the mobile boom.
